I received my Ph.D. in Genetics and Physiology from the Pavlov Institute of Physiology (Saint Petersburg, Russia) in the area of Behavioral Genetics and Physiology. As a Ph.D. student, I discovered several new genes that play important roles in learning and memory. As a postdoctoral fellow in the labs of Prof. Abraham Korol at the Haifa University (Israel) and Prof. Gabrielle Boulianne at The Hospital for Sick Children (Canada), I have continued to use Drosophila as a model to study behavioural and evolutionary genetics, neurobiology of learning and memory, modelling of human diseases, and aging.